Better Software Magazine Articles

Developing Your Sense of Smell

With all of the resources available these days—books, blogs, Webcasts, training,—that aid us in our design, are you one of those programmers who lacks the "olfactory gene" needed to detect refactoring odors in your code? Unit testing helps you refine your sense of smell and improve your code design.

Tod Golding's picture Tod Golding
Hurry Up & Wait

There are no industry standards for Web response times. How long a user is willing to wait for a Web page to load depends on any number of variables and conditions. Find out how to determine and quantify performance criteria and use those criteria to create happy customers.

Scott Barber's picture Scott Barber
Piles of Sand

When was the last time you thought about floating-point arithmetic? Chuck Allison says in order to attain maximum accuracy we need to brush up on our floating-point number knowledge and get back to our roots.

Chuck Allison's picture Chuck Allison
The Exceptional Exception

So much more than a bucket for your errors, exceptions can be a valuable tool that lets you communicate to your clients not only that there is a problem but why and where the code failed.

Tod Golding's picture Tod Golding
The Power of Persuasion

Twenty years ago, Brian Marick defined a small startup's company process and coding standard in his position as head of quality assurance--and didn't win any popularity points. Looking back, Brian thinks that he and others in charge of process would be more successful using persuasion than using commands.

Brian Marick
Browsers with a Bean to Grind

Listen in on a coffehouse conversation between Internet Explorer and Mozilla, that have been pushed to the brink by technologies that test their limits and a standards body that nixes their ability to innovate. Find out what they think of their previous successes and what the future holds.

Tod Golding's picture Tod Golding
Developers Who Test

Every software professional knows that testing is hard, and the situation is even bleaker for software developers. The good news is that effective techniques exist that won't break the schedule or overwhelm developers with test cases. Let loose your inner tester with patterns designed with developers in mind.

Neil Harrison
Logging a Path to Code Clarity

A good log file may be the best tool to track down those "cannot reproduce" bugs, but creating the best log takes a certain amount of careful nurturing. In this article, Tod Golding explains why log files can be worth every extra line of code.

Tod Golding's picture Tod Golding
Patterns Without Purpose

Architectural patterns are a convenient way to design and build your code, but be careful not to bite off more than you can chew. Tod Golding offers advice on avoiding useless layers and letting each pattern earn its way into your architecture.

Tod Golding's picture Tod Golding
Code With Character

Use .NET generics to get to know your data types and form more meaningful, trusting, typesafe relationships with them.

Tod Golding's picture Tod Golding

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